Charting a New Reformation, Part XXXVI – Thesis #11, Life After Death

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 22 September 2016 17 Comments
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Question

Teach me to pray. I have read Why Christianity Must Change or Die and it has been a great help to me as I could never get my head around the Bible. For the last 30 years I have followed faithfully eight of the Ten Commandments. When I become angry I sometimes swear and, like your book explains, I think the Fourth Commandment has never been followed.

Answer

Dear Glen,

Thank you for your letter

Let me go quickly to your request. Teach me to pray! The misunderstanding and difficulty people have with prayer most of the time is because they have not tried to define God outside of the theistic, authoritarian patterns of the past. If God is a supernatural, external power, prayer is an attempt to get God’s power to work for us. It is an attempt to impose my will onto God, to force God, a supernatural being, to do my will. If that is what prayer means to you, you will spend your life explaining why it doesn’t work. Why does tragedy occur? Why does suffering abound? Why is the world not perfect?

If one can escape theism sufficiently to begin to experience God as the “Source of life,” empowering me to live, the “Source of love,” freeing me to love, and the “Ground of Being,” giving me the courage to be all that I can be, then prayer begins to make sense. Prayer then is the activity that calls us to build a world in which life can be enhanced for everyone, love can be increased for everyone and the courage to be all that each person can be in the infinite variety of our humanity can be a possibility for everyone. Until this shift in the definition of our God experience occurs, trying to answer the question of how to pray will be an endless “merry-go-round.” Prayer, you see, is not a request for something, but the exercise required to open us to all that God is and all that God means.

In the first book that I wrote, Honest Prayer, (still available through St. Johann Press, Haworth, New Jersey), I sowed the seeds for understanding prayer this way. This book was written in 1972. I have grown far beyond that book today, but that was where the journey out of the prayer patterns of my youth began, so I still treasure it.

Hope this helps.

John Shelby Spong

 

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